Under Tools, Options, General Tab the choice for "Show my windows & tabs from last time" is grayed out. How do I access this option?
For over a year I've used the session restore feature by having Firefox "Show my windows & tabs from last time" (Tools, Options, General Tab, Startup section). While reading an article online a site said I needed 3rd-party cookies to read comments, so I tried to change this setting. My settings were such as to allow 3rd-party cookies but when I clicked out of the change attempt, I was told I needed to restart Firefox for changes to be effective. When I did, my previously windows & tabs did not come back, and the sessionstore.js file containing them was gone. I went to Tools, Options, General Tab, Startup section to ensure that the option "Show my windows & tabs from last time" was set. However, of the 3 options shown there, this one is grayed out--i.e., not available. Realizing I may not be able to recover the open windows & tabs I so desperately wanted to keep, now I can't even make the choice to reopen any current tabs upon a restart. I upgraded to Version 33.0.2 to see if this would change, but it didn't. Two questions: 1) How do I get the "Show my windows & tabs from last time" choice to appear NOT grayed out, and 2) is there any way to recover the windows & tabs I had open before this problem occurred? Again, I already had the "Show my windows & tabs from last time" option active, and for several months my open windows & tabs came back every time. Now, suddenly, I've lost them & can't even access the option to show newly opened tabs upon a restart.
All Replies (8)
hello, firefox won't save your tabs from last time when you've set it up to run in permanent private browsing mode ("never remember history" in the options > privacy panel).
Indeed mine was set that way, but previously it was set to remember history. I have no idea how it got changed. Does the option to use custom settings for browsing history also prevent the previous tabs from restoring through a sessionstore.js file?
I'm absolutely miffed that the open tabs were lost--they were items I hadn't bookmarked but wanted to go back and read more carefully.
Philipp, an amazing thing happened. When I changed the "Never remember history" to "Remember history" I was forced to do a restart of Firefox. Upon the restart, all of the open windows and tabs (2 windows, about 45 tabs) I previously had open reappeared. I thought they were gone forever, since I couldn't find a sessionstore file large enough to have contained them. I was going to resort to a series of procedures of renaming some files (thus keeping the current sessionstore file for future renaming back to its original), and rename a backup file (.bak extension) as the current file. But it appears my problem is solved. Thank you very much.
Well, Once it is set to "not to remember history", it will not leave any traces of that session on the browser. If you set it to custom it completely depends on your options selected. If you have unchecked "remember my browser history" it will lose all the tabs that are open.
So in order for Firefox to restore tabs, "browser.privatebrowsing.autostart:" must be "False"
Philipp, I have one more question that if solved, I'll be perfectly happy. I use the free Zonealarm firewall. With the last update, I was forced to accept a Zonealarm search page that opens when I click on the + sign to the right of all open tabs to open a new tab. I've looked for an answer on how to reset this to Google or another search engine, but haven't found the answer. Can you help with this?
your firewall seems to have dropped a (unwanted) toolbar within your extensions. please go to the firefox menu ≡ > addons > extensions, disable or remove "zonealarm.com 1.6.0" and see if this brings back the default new tab page in firefox with the search field and frequently visted sites.
Remove a toolbar that has taken over your Firefox search or home page
I believe I have the right settings now on the Options, Privacy page. But I'm not sure where to find the string you quoted. Is it a registry entry? If not, where & how do I find it?
Your System Details list shows that you have a user.js file in the profile folder to initialize prefs each time Firefox starts.
The user.js file is only present if you or other software has created this file and normally it wouldn't be there. You can check its content with a plain text editor (right-click: Open with) if you didn't create this file yourself.
The user.js file is read each time Firefox is started and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.
Your System Details list shows that you have preferences that were used in previous Firefox versions and that are no longer supported in the current Firefox release.
You can cleanup the prefs to have a fresh start and delete possible user.js and numbered prefs-##.js files and rename (or delete) the prefs.js file to reset all prefs to the default value including prefs set via user.js and prefs that are no longer supported in the current Firefox release.
You can use this button to go to the currently used Firefox profile folder:
- Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Directory: Show Folder (Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder)
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved